Why do we believe the things we believe? We are tempted to believe things the people we look up to believe. We are tempted to believe things our culture tells us to believe. We are tempted to believe things that are easy to believe. We are tempted to believe things we want to believe. We are tempted to believe things…
During Passover in Jerusalem the city is packed to the gills. A relatively small city has all kinds of pilgrims. Imagine an NFL game happening at Laidley Field while the Reds are playing at Power Park and the Mountaineers are playing basketball in the Civic Center. Charleston, West Virginia would be chaos. You’d be parking in Nitro. The wait at Pies…
On the third day there was a wedding at Cana in Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. 2 Jesus also was invited to the wedding with his disciples. 3 When the wine ran out, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.” 4 And Jesus said to her, “Woman, what does this have to do…
Healthy churches are not all about one person or one group of people. Healthy churches don’t merely gather to consume the content of gifted speakers or listen to gifted musicians. They understand that the pastor or team of pastors exist not to perform for them, but to equip them to do the work of ministry. To be clear: the ministry…
Jesus begins his public ministry in a Gentile village–Cana in Galilee. There, Jesus, his disciples, and his mother find themselves at a wedding feast–a feast that has gone horribly wrong. They have run out of wine. To us this could seem like a minor problem, but in an honor/shame culture, not providing bountifully for your guests would bring great shame…
To be fair, if you flip through the Bible, you will not find a single verse that says, “Thou shalt join a church.” But that’s not how we do theology. The BIble is not a giant fact book that we just directly pluck verse from without any context from the passage the verse is embedded in. Here, in the Word,…
Jesus has the first word in your spiritual journey. He knew you before you knew yourself. The Bible teaches that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us – that God searched for us and found us – that he ran to us while we were still a long way off. Jesus invites you to follow him – to…
We’re not a business, or club, or friend group per se – we are the body of Christ and family of God in the world. Healthy local bodies have six common characteristics, and today we’re going to talk about the first one. Healthy churches gather regularly for worship. But why do we gather? First, we gather because it’s commanded. Because…
Jesus is the Lamb of God. 29 The next day he saw Jesus coming toward him, and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world! 30 This is he of whom I said, ‘After me comes a man who ranks before me, because he was before me.’ 31 I myself did not know him,…
The Body of Christ 12 For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. 13 For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body— Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit. 1…